Planet of the Apes: Motion-Capture Gets Wild

The technology uses a network of carefully calibrated monochrome cameras that track the movements of reflective markers attached to key spots on the bodies of actors.

Weta/20th Century Fox

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MovieVillainsInspiredbyTechnophobia

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This summer is full of sci-fi thrillers, such as "Edge of the Tomorrow," "Lucy," "Interstellar" and "The Giver," to name a few. In all of these movies, technology is used for good and evil, just like in real life. Science fiction constantly holds a mirror up to society and culture and it's one of the reasons we love that genre. Our fears about the future are often reflected in the sci-fi stories we tell ourselves. In fact, the history of science fiction movies is lousy with mechanical villains inspired by our various technophobias. Who's the scariest of them all?
We can start with cybernetic assassin robots from the future in the Terminator movie series. Here, the T-800 stares us down with eyes capable of face recognition, long-range zoom, night vision and tracking two different moving targets at once. You won't go far.

Warner Bros. Pictures

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Above is the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1927 German expressionist epic "Metropolis." The hugely influential film dealt with themes like class revolt and the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization.

Kino International

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No list of technological terrors would be compete without HAL 9000, the murderous computer from Stanley Kubrick's classic "2001: A Space Odyssey." HAL reflects a fear that's been bouncing around sci-fi for decades -- the amoral computer that carries out its programming regardless of human life.

Wikimedia Commons

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The original Godzilla was a kind of technological terror himself -- a giant sea monster spawned by nuclear radiation. Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for the devastation of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan, and in 1974, director Jun Fukuda upped the ante with the robotic Mechagodzilla.

Toho Films

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Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror hybrid "Alien" explored another recurring trope in science fiction -- the man who's really a machine. In the film, the calculating android Ash determines that his human colleagues are expendable in pursuit of scientific knowledge.

20th Century Fox

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In his 1987 film "RoboCop," director Paul Verhoeven mixed science fiction with savage social satire. In a near-future Detroit, the robotic enforcer known as ED-209 is developed by the ruthless OmniCorp to make policing more cost effective -- even if it means the occasional bystander gets shot.

Orion Pictures

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Considered by many scholars to be the first true work of science fiction, Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein" has inspired dozens of films, including director Kenneth Branagh's 1994 version with Robert De Niro as the monster. The Frankenstein story continues to recycle itself in pop culture as a cautionary tale about science and technology run amok.

TriStar Pictures

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Several recent sci-fi films appear to reflect our increasing unease with drone technology. In the 2013 post-apocalypse thriller "Oblivion," Tom Cruise must contend with an entire squadron of unruly, unreasoning drones -- or "unmanned aerial vehicles," to use the fashionable military euphemism.
Who is your favorite techno-terror from the movies?

The men and women who survived a deadly virus that wiped out much of earth's human population hunker down amidst the ruins of San Francisco; meanwhile, a growing ape population has built a lovely and thriving community outside of San Francisco in Muir Woods. The tension between the two societies drives the action-packed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,the sequel to the 2011 Rise of the Planet the Apes that starred James Franco.

As this sequel begins, Franco's character has been dead for a decade, and the apes have had plenty of time to create their version of civilization. But in real time, it's been just three years since the Rise movie. In the world ofmotion picture technology, though, that's an eternity. Long enough to create computer graphics gear robust enough to take out of the studio and deep into a real forest. And long enough that moviemakers no longer need to give a recognizable Hollywood star top billing to bring in audiences.

Avatar's new performance capture technology may revolutionize the way directors, actors and animators collaborate to create whole new worlds on screen. Director James Cameron explains the process.

Discovery

In fact, if you passed the leading man of Dawn — Andy Serkis — on the street, you wouldn't recognize his face at all, for you never see it on the screen. That's because his performance in the woods (actually, forests near Vancouver, not San Francisco) wasn't filmed traditionally, it was motion-captured and used as a framework for a computer-created realistic digital ape, Caesar. And, for the first time in my knowledge, it's the performances of the motion capture actors, not the regular actors portraying humans, that are getting all the good reviews from critics; there is even talk of the first best-actor Oscar nomination for a motion-capture performance.

Motion capture enables moviemakers to create realistic non-human characters, including Gollum in Lord the Rings, the Na’vis of Avatar, and the intelligent chimpanzees and orangutans of Rise of the Planet the Apes. It has also let moviemakers digitally tweak human characters, aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The technology uses a network of carefully calibrated monochrome cameras that track the movements of reflective markers attached to key spots on the bodies of actors and then use built-in processors to extract the precise coordinates of the markers. A motion capture movie set also uses a handful of regular high resolution video cameras to record the overall scene for the director and others involved in the production to use as reference. Later, animators correlate the data about the marker locations with the same points on virtual characters, like shoulders, knees, and feet.

After it is imported into the computer system, the data about the movement of the markers becomes a connect-the-dots representation of how the human actor moved that drives the digital characters. Animators later adjust the movements to better match them to ape physiology. It’s a complicated business and has historically taken place in a studio or, at the most extreme, a small and contained outdoor area, where lighting, shadows, and reflections that could impede the tracking of the markers can be carefully controlled.

But the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, being released into theaters on 11 July took motion capture into the wild, with more than 85 percent of the movie shot outside the studio, in forests near Vancouver and in various outdoor locations near New Orleans.

Much of the movie action surrounds a community of 2000 apes, living in a rainforest-like environment. The technical challenges were huge, reported Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor, and Dejan Momcilovic, motion capture supervisor, both from New Zealand’s Weta Digital.

“We went deep into the forest, where it was raining and wet,” says Letteri. “It was the absolutely worst conditions we could have had for getting the [motion capture] to work reliably in.”